For us to move forward, three things must occur. We need to trust one another, communicate, and work together. Any given time you are either helping or hindering this cosmic endeavor.

While listening to a lecture by physicist Geoffrey West I was struck again by how important cities are to our species.1 The polis, the urban jungle, represents more than a collaborative sharing of resources–cities are the built environments that have  invigorated growth, invention and the multiplication of humanity at an exponential pace, in ways we […]

He compulsively views the same pictures of a certain young boy being raped. He is drawn to the images with a drive he cannot even fathom controlling. It is an obsession that has been raging for years now. He looks like you might expect: dirty, unkempt, bearing the scars of a life between shelters, temporary housing […]

…it doesn’t it doesn’t take a disaster to destroy a literature. If we stopped telling the stories and reading the books, we would discover that neglect is as powerful an agent as war and fire.1 (Thomas King) In the nineteenth century the federal government commissioned churches of various denominations to open schools with the explicit […]

Leadership as a methodology might sell a lot of books. Leadership as a job title is an institutional invention. Leadership as a discipline is the pathway to dogmatism. Leadership as an ideal  is the instigator of disillusionment. Leadership as a status tends to breed resentfulness. Leadership as a reality will simply change your neighborhood.

There are basically two kinds of people on the earth: Those who say, “There will be peace on earth when everyone understands that my ideology is true.” And others who say, “There will be peace on earth when everyone lives in mutual acceptance of one another’s ideological differences.” And for all this talk of peace, these two sides can’t […]

“The victim-rescuer-persecutor syndrome occurs frequently in human relationships of all kinds and is common in many helping relationships,” writes Lee Ann Hoff.1 This is a prevalent dilemma social work: in order to help people, care providers regularly tend to treat clients as victims. This is easy to do because the implication with seeing yourself as […]

Utopia is terrifying for the very same reason that it is impossible: it requires that everyone wants exactly the same thing. Utopia, therefore, represents either the end of free-will or the elimination of diversity. Take your pick. Instead of dreaming of a utopian world (or dreading a dystopian one), Why not acknowledge that omnitopia is always both […]

This analogy from the field of medicine is abundantly applicable in so many other arenas of life: My friend, Irving Zola, relates the story of a physician trying to explain the dilemmas of the modern practice of medicine: “You know,” he said, “sometimes it feels like this. There I was standing by the shore of a […]

Dear Israelis and Palestinians, Allow me to begin by confessing that I write these thoughts in sheer and total ignorance. I have no idea (nor can I truly begin to even imagine) what it is like to have a family member — my own flesh and blood — murdered by a rival ethnicity. I have […]